TECHNOLOGY: DIGITAL COMMERCE

TECHNOLOGY: DIGITAL COMMERCE; Innovation appears to be a scarce commodity. How will multimedia's new talent emerge from the interactive ooze?

By Denise Caruso

Published: May 22, 1995

YOU have read the book, seen the movie, listened to the audio tapes and called the fax line. Now buy the CD-ROM, log onto the Web site and interact!

That seems to be the new rallying cry of the entertainment industry, which has embraced interactive media. But few entertainment executives are actively seeking out and supporting new artistic approaches that are emerging from the interactive ooze. Such efforts have been swamped by those who see big dollar signs for "repurposing" movies into ancillary products like CD-ROM's and video games no matter what the artistic vision or technical expertise required.

The result has been an avalanche of software titles that should never have been published but are smothering the market. Products are in such abundance that one company sells stacks of CD-ROM's by the foot, like submarine sandwiches. As one studio executive snorted, "Ah yes, the Five-Foot Pack -- it adds a lot of dignity to the business."

An abundance of mediocrity is the reason so many people walked away disappointed from a trade show called the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles earlier this month. About 1,300 titles were introduced there, but the consensus on truly innovative titles for grown-ups yielded a very short list.

The lineup would include several titles from Inscape, a partnership of Nash New Media and Time Warner's Warner Music Group and Home Box Office units. There is also "Psychic Detective," a coming title from Electronic Arts co-produced with Colossal Pictures, an animation and special-effects studio. Also noteworthy is "Johnny Mnemonic" from Sony Imagesoft, based on a short story by the science fiction writer William Gibson and about to be released as a movie.

While their approaches vary, all these titles are serious efforts to create immersive, transporting experiences for the people using them. All are dedicated to story and psychological engagement.

A quirky story line, the artful use of video and an innovative user interface is what distinguishes "Psychic Detective." The work is a collaboration of the video artist John Sanborn and the screenwriter Michael Kaplan, who work for Colossal Pictures, and the producer, Jim Simmons of Electronic Arts, who came up with the premise. The story is based on a television documentary some years back about a Russian psychic spy ring, financed by the KGB, that supposedly engaged in mind pirating and psychic assassinations .

When the ring broke up, many of the psychics moved to the United States. That is where the game begins. The cheesy protagonist, Eric, a "psychic detective" with a lounge act, gets seduced into the action by Lena, a Russian psychic.

The user interface, controlled by the computer mouse, allows players to see the world from Eric's perspective, but also to choose to jump in and out of most of the other characters' minds, learning about their motivations as the story proceeds.

As they interact, players become intimately familiar with the personalities of characters in popular TV series, except that here the the interactive technology enables the players to participate in the characters' lives. The process sets up an environment of emotional ambiguity that Mr. Sanborn says is fascinating to adults, especially women.

Video and an innovative user interface are also employed to spectacular effect in "Johnny Mnemonic," the first interactive title to use full-screen video so compellingly.

Developed for Sony by Propaganda Code, a division of Propaganda Films (the producer of the film "Wild at Heart" and the television series "Twin Peaks") the game could set a new standard of what consumers will expect from interactive video. Propaganda found a way to remove any evidence of the user interface from the computer screen -- there are no buttons, no menu bars and no scores. A player knows it is time to do something when the screen ratio changes to the horizontal letterbox format. The overall effect is both artsy and immersive.

Propaganda has managed to keep video and audio synchronized no matter how fast the interaction and also because it was beautifully shot and directed. Sony and Propaganda co-own some of the proprietary programming code that made "Johnny Mnemonic" possible; here's hoping they don't hog it all for themselves and instead license it to other software developers. The world would be a better place.

The three titles scheduled for release this fall from Inscape are also compelling, though their subject matter and approach are radically different from both "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Psychic Detective."

Inscape is the company that everyone in the interactive media business is talking about. as a result of early demonstrations of its debut titles. All three are richly rendered, engaging and so far unlike almost anything else on the market.

"The Residents' Bad Day on the Midway" is a character study at a bizarre carnival, from the San Francisco cult band the Residents and the animator-designer Jim Ludtke.

"The Dark Eye," which uses a phrenologist's cranial map to explore the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, is animated by Doug Beswick (whose work was seen in the films "Beetlejuice" and "The Addams Family"), scored by the musician-composer Thomas Dolby and narrated by the Beat writer William Burroughs.

"Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol" is a lunatic adventure game from Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, founders and principle songwriters for Devo, the eccentric band of the late 1970's.

Inscape's first products may seem too much in the vanguard to find a large audience. But the president of the company, Michael Nash, said his inspiration was Broderbund's pioneering "Myst." "Myst" has never been bundled as a giveaway with the sale of a computer or CD-ROM drive, but has still sold a record 1.2-million-plus copies. The success of "Myst" convinced Mr. Nash that a market existed for personal, artistic visions from what some people were calling the "garage bands" of multimedia.

Mr. Nash's earlier work with the Voyager Company, a pioneering multimedia developer, probably made it easier for him to get the attention of partners like HBO and Warner Music. For lesser-knowns, it is difficult to be discovered. In the music business, scouts go to clubs. Studios comb film schools. But when it takes at least a quarter-million dollars to develop a title, not to mention arranging a private session with a personal computer to test-drive a concept, how will the multimedia industry discover and cultivate its garage bands?

Considering the multimillions of dollars being spent on mediocrity, a giant business opportunity awaits whoever solves the puzzle. The alternative is more Five-Foot Packs.